Anne Tyler's Compass: A Review

“In the sixty-first
year of his life, Liam Pennywell lost his job.” For most
of us, such an experience would turn our lives on end.
But Liam, the protagonist in Anne Tyler’s seventeenth
novel, Noah’s Compass, looking on the bright side
of things, observes: “It wasn’t such a good job,
anyhow.” Trained in philosophy, he’d been teaching fifth
grade “in a second-rate private boys’ school.” Indeed,
it might even be “just the nudge he needed to push him
on to the next stage… where he sat in his rocking chair
and reflected on what it all meant, in the end”.*

The tectonic life
changes that often provide the punctuation mark to what
the Hindus call the Householder stage of life —
retirement (voluntary or compulsory), the empty nest
experience, or a life-threatening medical event — are
indeed often the nudge to enter a next stage of
life. Those who, like Liam, have “accomplished all the
conventional tasks — grown up, found work, gotten
married, had children” [12]
— then move on to the Forest Dweller stage where
they throw off the encumbrances of their accumulated
possessions, slim down, and begin to live more simply.

Liam thinks he’s
ready for this — in spades. He’d “tossed out
bales of old magazines and manila folders stuffed with
letters and three shoe boxes of index cards from the
dissertation that he had never gotten around to
writing.” He’d palmed off much of his extra furniture on
his three daughters and paid “1-800-GOT-JUNK to truck
away” the rest” [4]. Now, when we meet
him, it’s moving day; and he is taking possession of a
smaller apartment where he plans to live modestly and
within his reduced means.

No pain; no gain.

The transition proves
anything but smooth. At the end of Chapter 1, Liam falls
asleep in his new apartment feeling “a mild stirring of
curiosity” about what this next phase of life — his
“winding down” stage — will be like. At the beginning of
Chapter 2, he wakes up in a hospital bed with no
recollection of how he got there — no memory of
scuffling with a supposed intruder and suffering the
severe blow to his head that has caused the amnesia. The
memory is simply gone; it has, in the words of Billy
Collins’ wonderful poem, “Forgetfulness”:

decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Liam fixates on this
missing fragment of his life. “The distressing thing
about losing a memory… was that it felt like losing
control. Something had happened, something significant,
and he couldn’t say how he’d comported himself” [26]. “I feel like I’ve lost
something,” he tells the neurologist. “A part of my life
has been stolen from me. I don’t care if it was
unpleasant; I need to know what it was”
[62-63]. To his youngest daughter,
Kitty, who stays with him his first night home from the
hospital, he says: “You can’t imagine how it feels to
know you’ve been through something so catastrophic and
yet there’s no trace of it in your mind”
[48]. No, she can’t
imagine how it feels: nor can Louise, her older sister;
nor Barbara, his ex-wife; nor Xanthe, his daughter by
his first wife Millie; nor Julia, his sister. Among this
large cast of boisterous and assertive women, only
mousey Eunice, the “professional rememberer,” with whom
he begins a very unconventional courtship, seems to
understand:

“I guess I should be glad,” he told her. “I’m better off
forgetting, right? But that’s not how I feel about it.”

“Well, of course it’s not,” she said. “You want to know
what happened.”

“Yes, but there’s more to it than that. Even if someone
could tell me what happened — even if they told me every
detail — I would still feel…I don’t know…”

“You would still feel something was missing,” Eunice
said.

“Exactly.”

“Something you yourself have lived through, and it ought
to belong to you now, not just to someone who
tells you about it” [109].

“I don’t want to end up simply
having visited this world.”
— Mary Oliver

Near the end of the
book, Liam recalls a “running joke” from The Dean
Martin Show:

… about his drinking,
remember? Always going on about his drunken binges.
And so one night one of the guests was reminiscing
about a party they’d been to and Dean Martin asked,
“Did I have a good time?”[263]

Through the course of
the novel, Liam comes to realize that he “had
experienced only the most glancing relationship with his
own life”

[241]. Did he have a good
time? He can’t answer the question. Something
catastrophic happened to him (something I will leave
undisclosed): “His true self had gone away from him and
had a crucial experience without him and failed to come
back afterward” [49].
Liam learns how heavy a price we pay when we bury
painful memories: “The trouble with discarding bad
memories was that evidently the good ones went with
them” [275]. And so, by the end
of the novel, the lost memory of his attack has become
emblematic of his unlived life:

If the memory … were
handed to him today, he would just ask, Is that
it? Where’s the rest? Where’s everything else
I’ve forgotten: my childhood and my youth, my first
marriage and my second marriage and the growing up
of my daughters? Why, he’d had amnesia all along”

Becoming old is not
the same thing as becoming an elder. We do the first
just by putting in our time; like Liam, we march — or
trudge — through life ticking off “all the conventional
tasks” of growing up and making our way in the world
and, at the end, arrive at our “winding down stage.”
Coming to wisdom is a much more mysterious process that
involves both life review — for Liam, a radical recovery
of his own life — and forgiveness work.

Lives that have come
to wisdom may — on the surface — look to some
imagined objective observer unchanged from what went
before. When Liam reenters the labor force at the end of
the novel — this time to work as a “zayda,” a teacher’s
aide in a nearby Jewish pre-school (Zayda in Hebrew
means grandfather) — it may seem that the downward
spiral that has become his “professional career” has
simply reached a new low. But such measures no longer
pertain. The Liam who settles into his favorite
armchair, content to spend Christmas Day by himself, is
not the same man we met at the beginning of the book.
What he says is true: he “really wanted nothing. He had
an okay place to live, a good enough job. A book to
read. A chicken in the oven. He was solvent, if not
rich, and healthy. Remarkably healthy”

[276-77].

What
more could he possibly desire?

*Anne
Tyler, Noah's Compass (New York: Afred A. Knopf, 2009), p.
3. The page reference of subsequent citation are given in
brackets and refer to the same hardcover edition of the
book.